Search system and methods with integration of user annotations from a trust network

Abstract

Computer systems and methods incorporate user annotations (metadata) regarding various pages or sites, including annotations by a querying user and by members of a trust network defined for the querying user into search and browsing of a corpus such as the World Wide Web. A trust network is defined for each user, and annotations by any member of a first user's trust network are made visible to the first user during search and / or browsing of the corpus. Users can also limit searches to content annotated by members of their trust networks or by members of a community selected by the user.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCES TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application claims the benefit of the following two U.S. Provisional Patent Applications:[0002]Application No. 60 / 553,577, filed Mar. 15, 2004, entitled “Search Systems and Methods with Integration of User Judgments Including Trust Networks”; and[0003]Application No. 60 / 623,282, filed Oct. 28, 2004, entitled “Search Systems and Methods with Integration of User Judgments Including Trust Networks.”The respective disclosures of these applications are incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.[0004]The present disclosure is related to commonly-owned co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11 / 081,860, filed Mar. 15, 2005, entitled “Search Systems and Methods with Integration of User Annotations,” the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0005]The present invention relates in general to searching a corpus of documents, and in particular to search systems and method...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

This approach improves the relevance of search results by prioritizing content annotated by trusted users, allowing users to easily share and organize relevant information, and enhances the browsing experience by aggregating ratings and metadata from trusted sources.

Problems solved by technology

Frequently, a query will return such a large number of hits that it is impossible for a user to explore all of the hits in a reasonable time.

If the first few links a user follows fail to lead to relevant content, the user will often give up on the search and possibly on the search service provider, even though relevant content might have been available farther down the list.

This proved inadequate, and algorithms in use today typically incorporate other information, such as the number of other sites on the Web that link to a given hit page (which reflects how useful other content providers think the hit page is), in addition to the presence of search terms on the hit page itself.

Existing algorithms, however, generally do not take into account preferences of individual users.

Thus, a site that satisfies one user (or many users) might not satisfy the next user who enters the same query, and that user might still give up in frustration.

While bookmarking can be helpful, this tool also has its limitations.

For instance, even with folders it can be difficult for a user to remember which bookmarked page had a particular item of information that the user might be looking for at a given time.

Also, existing bookmarking tools generally do not help the user identify whether he (or she) has already bookmarked a given page, nor do they provide any facilities for searching bookmarked information.

Further, existing bookmarking technologies do not provide easy ways for users to share their bookmarks with other users.

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